Shortest Path Training and S-branch are delighted to offer i2 Analyst’s Notebook Online Self-Paced Learning, which will be available to our customers from early 2023. Our training is designed for our customers tackling fraud and crime in a variety of sectors.

Our course is delivered by Shortest Path’s highly experienced trainers who specialise in the software. We’ve taken their extensive experience in delivering classroom training to build a video led, self-paced learning environment that allows you to learn software effectively at your own pace, around your existing commitments.

The course contains several lessons which in turn include: Lesson objectives, professionally filmed training videos, multiple choice exercises and course files ready for you to download and have a go on your own system.

The course is designed to be taken at a time that suits you and all pre-requisites will be stated at the start of each lesson.

For further information and to register your interest please email us at: info@shortestpathtraining.co.uk

What skills will you gain?

• Build and structure Association and Timeline charts to enable understanding of the key concepts of Entities and Links, such as:
  • Identity & Label
  • Date & Time; and
  • Attributes
• This will allow the effective creation of charts for interpreting networks, sequences, and accurate analysis
• You will also learn how to create briefing charts, as well as how to correctly prepare them for dissemination

S-branch

We’ve been part of the i2 journey since 2006, either as trainers, technical consultants or marketers. Through these roles, we’ve worked with several police forces both in the UK and abroad, charities, insurance firms, law firms, government agencies, and commercial clients.

If you’re an i2 user and require technical expertise, please feel free to contact us”

The best thing about S-branch is our customers. Without exception, all our customers are using data to disrupt or prevent Crime or Fraud. TRAFFIC is one example, working to counter trade in wild animals and plants in the context of both biodiversity conservation and sustainable development.

In 2021 TRAFFIC initiated a project to identify potential instances of corruption in the timber sector, specifically at the point where politically exposed persons (PEPs) allocate companies the rights to harvest wood. The end goal is to use this data to provide credible evidence to financial institutions, encouraging them to investigate further and take action where needed. TRAFFIC’s project was funded under a larger project: Targeting Natural Resource Corruption (TNRC).

The Method

TRAFFIC has access to several different analytical tools and databases. They also have a talented team from a variety of different backgrounds. S-branch was involved early in the process, initially to review TRAFFIC’s method and how they planned to utilise technology. There was an appetite to use technology that TRAFFIC had previously invested in, although a few new tools were added to the arsenal!

Data Collection

Once the country of interest had been selected, the data collection itself was managed by TRAFFIC. There is a wealth of online published information around forestry concessions usually published by the government themselves. Likewise, there is a good amount of information around Politically Exposed Persons (PEPs), sometimes including their family members.

In some cases, TRAFFIC could download the information directly. In other cases, TRAFFIC used ParseHub to scrape data that couldn’t easily be downloaded.

Data Processing

The data collected was varied in its format. While not huge in size it was no small task to coerce this data into a standard format for analysis. This is usually the difficult, time consuming and less glamorous side of analysing data.

There were several challenges with standardising the data, including inconsistencies with the use of accents on names. There was also the need to identify similar people or company names. TRAFFIC managed these tasks in house with data management and occasionally some code. Although the initial analysis was done Excel, TRAFFIC and S-branch eventually moved the data to an analysis database (i2 iBase) to allow patterns in the data to be explored.

Identifying Persons of Interest (i2)

The initial stage was to identify forestry owners and PEPs with similar names that lived in the same region.TRAFFIC has been using i2 Analyst’s Notebook and i2 iBase for several years. S-branch decided to utilise these tools to identify Persons of Interest for further analysis. i2’s ability to display network visualisations alongside geospatial data made it the perfect tool for this.

People with very similar names in the same town were marked in red, while those in a similar region were marked in orange.

Data Enrichment (Videris)

The People of Interest were then investigated further using basic OSINT (Open-Source Intelligence) techniques. TRAFFIC and S-branch also utilised Videris, an OSINT tool that assists in collecting, analysing and visualising open-source data.

On more than one occasion Videris identified social media accounts or news articles that had not been found on the manual OSINT searches. For this reason, we found Videris invaluable for the enrichment stage.

Briefing (i2)

The results of the data enrichment were collected to brief the internal teams. These briefing charts could eventually be passed to financial institutions, to encourage them to investigate further.

Here i2 Analyst’s Notebook was the obvious choice for producing clear and concise briefing content. i2 is widely regarded as the standard for charting which means anything TRAFFIC has made can easily be passed to law enforcement or financial institutions who more than likely already use i2.

High-Level Analysis (Power BI)

There was an appetite to look at the data from ‘the top down’. This analysis would identify patterns and statistical trends. This data would be useful to both the TRAFFIC analysis team and their managers and stakeholders. It would also need to be in a format that is easy to consume, easy to share and didn’t require any specific analysis tools to view.

TRAFFIC are already users of Power BI. This meant that using just a browser, the TRAFFIC team could access interactive dashboards exploring data about PEPs and forestry concession owners. The visualisation below explores the information known about PEPs.

Summary

The TNRC project proves that it is not one person or piece of technology that makes a project successful. It’s a collaboration of talented people and technology that used well can yield good results.

TRAFFIC already had access to several different analytical tools and databases. They also have a talented team from a variety of different backgrounds. TRAFFIC’s talent was combined with S-branch’s experience in analysing fraud and crime data, using a variety of different tools and technology.

To find out more about the TNRC project, please see TRAFFIC’s blog here. If you are looking at running a similar project and are looking at analysis tools to assist you, please contact S-branch for more information.

For more information on TRAFFIC visit their website. If you’d like to find out more about the products mentioned in this blog, please contact S-branch

PowerBI and Clue – Take your analysis to a new level

We are huge fans of PowerBI here at S-branch. If we ever need to get a ‘lie of the land’ with a new set of data, then it’s our go-to tool. Likewise, we’ve utilised data held within analysis databases using PowerBI before, an example can be found here.

One tool that we were keen to try PowerBI on was Clue. Clue is an investigation case management and intelligence platform that enables organisations to build intelligence and quickly manage and progress investigations. We instantly liked Clue. It’s refreshing to see technology that is designed specifically for Investigations. Too often we see people managing investigations using tools not fit for the job. This leads to workarounds and compromises – Not with Clue!

Being a modern application, Clue has its own API (Application Programming Interface). It is with this API that we interrogated the data within Clue using PowerBI.

Clue’s API

Clue’s API documentation can be found on their support site. We found it to be concise and helpful. We were quickly making API calls using the Postman API Platform to test our requests. There are security measures in place that need to be set up before you start using the API, again this was all documented on the support site.

Making Clue data available using Power BI

Clue has a great article about Power BI on their support site, with examples using Power Query. Utilising Power Query meant we could perform additional basic transformations (such as splitting out date/time fields) on the data too.

The Dashboards

On our test Clue site, we only have a limited amount of data. For this reason, we chose to focus on the Intelligence register.

In the dashboard above, we bring together temporal (time), network and statistical analysis in one place. We can drill down into the data using any one of these analysis types, using interactive visualisations.

• The bottom left shows statistics on the intelligence grading (3x5x2) in accordance with the National Intelligence Model
• The date of the Intelligence can be interrogated either using a slider or by clicking on a specific time period (in this case a month)
• The network visualisation can be used to spot commonalities between the intelligence records. The green dots show people that have more than one intelligence record linked to them. This method of visualisation proved quite performant, we tested it against some of our other datasets with 10’s of thousands of records and the results were impressive
• A filter on the network visualisation allows us the ability to focus on the elements that are important to us
• The righthand side analyses the linked Outcomes, Decisions, Tasks and Events linked to the intelligence.

It’s important to mention at this point that Clue does have its own dashboard and network analysis capability. PowerBI builds on this ability by having all this information in one place with an interactive dashboard.

Clue is used to tackle threats including counter economic crime, cybercrime, organised crime, corruption, counter-terrorism, environmental crime, human trafficking, counter extremism, drug crime, sexual and violent crime, and hate crime.

If any of the above could benefit you or you’re looking into data analysis tools in general; please feel free to contact us. For more information on Clue, please visit their website

Since 1990 i2 has been providing its customers with accessible and intuitive data analysis tools. Analyst’s Notebook has now become the standard for charting data and is used in nearly all of the UK police forces. The potential of Analyst’s Notebook sitting on top of a database was very quickly understood. This understanding spawned the release of iBase, iBridge and later on enterprise solutions such as EIA.

This movement towards visualising larger datasets made the offering applicable to not only law enforcement but to government agencies, military, and commercial clients as well. If you have a sporadic flow of data in formats that vary greatly, i2 is still one of the most compelling tools on the market.

i2 Acquisition – Harris Computer Corporation

Harris computer corporation, has acquired the i2 intelligence analysis product portfolio of IBM, including the i2 Analyst’s Notebook, i2 Enterprise Insight Analysis (EIA) and i2 iBase platforms. The acquisition sits nicely in Harris’ existing portfolio, delivering mission-critical applications for national defence, state & local law enforcement, maritime security as well as evidence management.

More about the acquisition can be found here

S-branch and i2

You may be aware that many of the team at S-branch are ex-i2 employees. We are delighted to see i2 settling into its new home. i2 will be allowed to run as a semi-independent entity again, rather than a side product of a cyber product line.

Harris’ i2 group will be headed up by an ex-i2 team who share our passion for the product. We believe i2 is in safe hands to progress forward, continuing to deliver powerful analysis technology to its customers. As always we are working with this team to assist with feedback and help shape the future of the product line.

More about how S-branch can assist you with i2 can be found here

What does this mean for S-branch clients?

No change, no worries. We will continue to deliver best in class consultancy on the i2 product suite. We will maintain our close relationship with the key members of the i2 development, sales and product management teams, allowing us to maintain our i2 knowledge and feedback into the product whenever we can.

If you have any questions, maybe you’re looking into i2 or looking into data analysis tools in general; please feel free to contact us.

Alot of our clients use dual monitors. It’s great for comparing data and especially good when comparing rows and columns to visualisations in i2.

A few of our clients have reported that Analyst’s Notebook/iBase seemed to ‘hang’ and not respond when a user clicks on the ‘Find’ function, either through the Data Sources pane or through the right-click menu. This usually coincided with switching from dual screens to a single screen.

Analyst’s Notebook/iBase seems to assume there is another screen when there isn’t! It sometimes persists even when you go back to two screens.

There is a quick registry change to fix this. We recommend that you ask your IT to do the following tasks or back up your registry settings before attempting the below.

• Close iBase and Analyst’s Notebook

• Go to the start windows start menu and type “Regedit”. Say okay to any of the following screens until you are presented with the registry editor. You may need IT to give you access/to do this.

• Use the folder tree on the left to navigate to: Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\i2\iBase\8\

• Delete the folder DialogSettings

• Reopen Analyst’s Notebook and try again.

S-branch

We’ve been part of the i2 journey since 2006, either as trainers, technical consultants or marketers. Through these roles, we’ve worked with several police forces both in the UK and abroad, charities, insurance firms, law firms, government agencies, and commercial clients.

If you’re an i2 user and require technical expertise, please feel free to contact us